Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language. It is a sacred language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, as well as the origin of most of the Indian languages. Today, about 14,000 people in India use it as their daily language.[1] It is one of the 22 official languages of India,[3] and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand.[4]

Sanskrit is a standardized dialect of Old Indo-Aryan. Its linguistic ancestry can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European. The Indo-Aryan migration theory proposes that the Indo-Aryans migrated from the Central Asian steppes into South Asia during the early part of the 2nd millennium BC, bringing with them the Indo-Aryan languages.[5] The main script used to write Sanskrit is Devanāgarī, though it can be written in various scripts of Indian languages.

William Jones, who was working as a judge in India at the time, was studying Sanskrit when he realized how similar Sanskrit was to Latin and Greek. It was then when he would discover the relationship among the Indo-European languages.